He says he’s the one that found it, though he wasn’t sure, from a walkaway, what it was at first. Not until he came right to it, until he knelt in the sand beside the bloat and sog that he realized. And even closer he wasn’t sure, at that time, what it was, what with his poor eyes, that sort of yellow-blond-white hair and scum and clay clumped about the ears—and the gullshit gray green pale soft slime of scum in the nose and creases of the forehead and sunken cheeks, and what comes to him is it’s a body and no adolescent. Not until he bends down and looks where the mouth should be, all maggoty-crawly and cave-like, and the flies there some susurrous of open window, and he sees the green-yellow nubs of teeth, all lined up perfect as beads, that he knows it’s a body for sure. At first, he says, it looked like a fish-bloat or seal washed ashore or some other cast-up.

[ ]

He says just beyond the Sisters’ pier, not half a walk to the village, below the crags folks call Watchful Point, by the three pines that overlook the cove. She was half stuffed in an old canvas bag made from what looked like sailcloth—like a sailbag, itself—and with such neat and careful stitching, because he’s worked sailcloth himself, a sailmaker by trade many seasons, and he still admires that, such careful, lady-like stitches for the weight! And he says it hadn’t been washed up but within two days, for he was down that way not four tides before of the very week, and because it hadn’t taken to air and bone, you know, like fish or gulls do, when the crawlies eat away the soppy flesh and skin, but it must, by the looks of the size of it, he says, and the whiteness—that terrible sun-bleach of the arms beneath the charredy hairs—must have been in the water for some time. And the sea, he says, reclaims its own, discards the rest.

[ ]

Oh, he says, he goes below the crags, and even some days halfway beyond the Sisters’, nearly three, four times a week, for finders-keepers, that is, to rummage the beach, because he’s retired, you know, and the old eyes and weak fingers—some days most impossible to boil his coffee til the joints work free—fingers that won’t knot nets the way they once did. A skill long lost, if they must know, with nylon and all. Oh, he says, and he goes as well for wood for his fire, as his shack doesn’t any longer have the stove he sold to send his woman’s girl—such a good child, to want to stay after her mother died—to that school the Sisters arranged. He goes often—no, never to the school on the mainland, and it’s been eight or nine years since the girl left—he means the nunnery above the point, where quite often the Father will give him food, fishbake or corn biscuits. Othertimes, if he’s lucky and the sea willing, he can sell what he finds—the clothes or traps or coolers or bouys or fishing gear—to the trinket dealer, you know, the one what comes around like the moon. But he knew right off, he says, no trinket man would find interest in a sodden sack.

[ ]

He says he’d not planned to go on the beach that morning because that morning he was moving stiff and pain-like, his legs like they were asleep, but when the morning came fog-calm and spooky and strange-smelling—not like the usual tar and seaweed and fish—well, he says, he knew what it is now, but he hadn’t known then, that smell like somebody’d tossed sweets onto their shitpile, unburied, or an animal got beneath the floor and died—stinking to heaven like they do—not the most terrible smell he had ever nosed, more earthy and sweet this time—well, he wanted to find out where that smell came from and to find somebody to cover it up or he’d do it himself. It wasn’t very church-like, he says, for the Sisters to have to smell that during prayers. Now he knows what the smell was, but he didn’t then.

[ ]

Of course, he says, there was nothing else to do but get rid of it. So he packs it best he can all into the bag—carefully, you know, how soft it was—, and he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t a she because it didn’t have any clothes on, at least that he could see—and stuffed in the other thing too—back in, and carried it [so light in life!, so wet in sand!]—dragged it, actually, up the rock and hill best he could to the nunnery, where the Father at the out-cottage would know—such a kind man to feed him and all—what he should do. But the Father, he says, his eyes grew like tidal moons and empty-like, turning sickly, almost as white as she, and then holding his nose with one hand—pinched it between the thumb and finger like this, someone too grabby a metal cup of coffee, and didn’t talk, so as not to sound comical, you know, how carnival people do, or when he’s flu-ed up and all—the Father points to the graves of godly souls, even beyond the graves—where he pointed out to you sirs earlier when he first showed you—and the Father waved his hand from the wrist, circles, like he is brushing off flies in the air—no cloak, if that’s what they call them, or nothing, just the white shirt—to show that he was to take the bag back there. Well, he says, he did.

[ ]

Then he did nothing, he says. That is, until the Father came out from the shed and handed him a shovel and had one himself and told him to dig somewhere around where he had showed them, outside of where the regular godly souls are waiting, and he couldn’t figure it then, and he doesn’t figure it now, but he knew the Father, who was so kind to feed him sometimes, a church-man and all, knew what to do, the proper thing, and it occurred to him that perhaps what the sea took away was so much more that it wouldn’t do to leave behind the body where it might disturb the others, that there’d likely be a place more suitable—he didn’t know—and by then the smell was baddening because the sun as almost noon-high and the flies were as thick as on a bullseal’s back, so he doesn’t ask, he just digs. Well, he says, it’s no longer than an eating time when his shoulders begin to hurt real bad, you know, and the Father he’s tooken off his shirt and his pale back is all salmony while he works, and his wooden shovel handle is slick with sweat, just keeps digging and digging without a stop—then after an hour or so, he had dug enough, the Father said. Then without a pause for gloving, the Father opens the bag—oh the hot spewing forth!—and sorts around in among the warm soppy flesh and pulls forth that other thing and throws it far back beyond the hole, where he showed them. Then, he says, the Father nudges with his boot the open spilling bag into the hole. Then the Father fills it in. No help from him.

[ ]

What else, he says, as he said before, was how as their shovel-heads shinked into the rocky soil, the Father asked if he was a believer, and he said yes, he thought so. And then the Father asked if he also believed in witches, and he said no, he didn’t really think about them. And then the Father asked him if he thought a person of the church could be a witch as well and work spells against the miracles of the Word of God, and he said he really didn’t understand all that at that time, you know, though now he did sort of since they were so kind as to explain it, that is, what the devil the Father was talking about, and the Father said that’s good, that faith is sometimes easier for the one less understands.

[ ]

Nothing else, he says. But what he’s told already: the strange marks, the long thin slits he saw in the arms and shoulders of the body as the Father prodded it into bag, the skinrips, laid-open, unhealed and white-blue, like the furrows on the beach sometimes, and not even crawly with maggots at that time, the flesh laid open, he thought, to seawater. So much like a slaughtered seal, the white bloated, light haired body. And the other thing he showed them. He didn’t really know. It must have been an animal, the thin legs and pointed ears, but it was too hard to tell by now, just a matted flat of patchy hair, yellow sort of, the head crushed flat by something, the hair stripped from the tail—like an animal what’s struggled itself in a trap or run downover with a wagonwheel. What did they think? A cat? He didn’t know. And could he please go home now as his innerds was moaning like a foghorn, and his fire by now had gone out at the shack, and he was afraid, lately, to roam around after sunset because of the chanting and screaming he hears in his sleep and the sun was already low and red and deep above the sea.

Author of the article

Phillip Sterling's most recent book is a collection of short fiction titled In Which Brief Stories Are Told (Wayne State U Press), a Finalist for the 2011 Midwest Book Award in the category of short stories/anthology. He is also the author of a collection of poetry (Mutual Shores) and editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange. He retired from Ferris State University in May 2013.